First day BlackBerry PlayBook sales exceed expectations

Further conflicting news come forward on the early sales of the BlackBerry PlayBook as Zach Epstein from BGR reports market data that may, or may not, surprise you:

Amid multiple reports to the contrary, RBC Capital Markets General Manager Mike Abramsky on Wednesday said first day PlayBook sales likely exceeded analysts’ expectations. In a note to investors, Abramsky states that RIM may have moved about 50,000 PlayBook tablets on launch day alone, including pre-order sales. The analyst and his team placed calls to 70 different Best Buy, Staples and RadioShack locations to inquire about PlayBook sales performance on launch day. Reported performance ranged from light sales in some locations to sell-outs, which occurred at 11% of the stores RBC polled. RBC also used Best Buy’s online inventory tool to check stock at 180 additional locations in 10 major U.S. cities, and found that the 16GB PlayBook is unavailable at 13% of stores, the 32GB model is unavailable at 87% of stores and the 64GB model is unavailable at 91% of the locations viewed. As preliminary inventory quantities for these stores is currently unknown, this information is of little use since many stores might not have received higher-capacity PlayBook models to begin with. Finally, Abramsky notes that the PlayBook may have outperformed first-day sales of Motorola’s XOOM and even Samsung’s popular Galaxy Tab, and he believes RIM is on track to sell 500,000 PlayBook tablets in its first quarter of availability.

I personally think this is fantastic news. With all the recent negative reviews and harsh criticism, R.I.M. needed some glimmer of hope. Hopefully, these figures turn out to be true.

Oh, and I love using the PlayBook to browse blackberryos.com!! :P

Sometimes trailer is bad and movie is good so i guess the reviews and all the negative stuff turned out to be good in the end. and thanks once again to Joe Jerde for making the public aware.

In my opinion, playbook will take some time to penetrate in the market as it's launched recently and it has to cope up with so many negative reviews. Consumers maybe a bit hesitant to have it at the moment but things will change when the come to know good about it from other users.

Sometimes trailer is bad and movie is good so i guess the reviews and all the negative stuff turned out to be good in the end. and thanks once again to Joe Jerde for making the public aware.

In my opinion, playbook will take some time to penetrate in the market as it's launched recently and it has to cope up with so many negative reviews. Consumers maybe a bit hesitant to have it at the moment but things will change when the come to know good about it from other users.

Thanks Amy, always try to look at the big picture.

Most of the gripes are really small things for RIM, but big things for the BB user. Like being able to use the bridge app, bbm, ect. Seems that all issues are software related. This can easily be fixed and will be.

I'm not giving RIM a free pass, and I do believe they should have had these features covered on launch. For a first tablet, going into a already dominated market niche, it will be a success.

It would seem that a number of "so called reviews" that the reviewer has not purchased and used a playbook!

Ok so some of the reviewers are stuck with rotten service providers that have not yet sorted out the bridge software, but to read some of the reviews shows how biased they are!

As for the Playbook? well years ago I laid out the rough spec for a tablet to use with a BlackBerry phone, Oh now its been made !

Screen great, functions great, os great, any downside ? It would have been nice to have a standard usb port as the uses for this tablet are huge IF you can get data in like an external scope box ! ( maybe possible with Bluetooth?) will have to investigate the hardware more.